LEGO (33 page)

After a slow lap through the shop, I grab a small Creator and Batman buggy set.

“I’m good,” I tell Steve after a few minutes.

“No, c’mon,” says Steve, “you can get more. Go ahead.” And there goes my willpower. I walk around the store like a contestant on Supermarket Sweep, blindly grabbing sets to take to the register. The total is $120, even with the benefit of a heavy employee discount. In the past four days, I have bought twelve LEGO sets; I’m officially a binge purchaser. I offer to give Steve a ride home, and we head out, the oversize LEGO bags rattling around in the trunk.

“You know that looks exactly like a LEGO half-pipe,” says Steve, as we sit idling behind a truck in traffic.

“You do that too?” I say a bit too excitedly. “You find LEGO parts in real life?”

“I can’t stop doing it. Some things just match up too well,” says Steve.

This is like discovering that an acquaintance had the same childhood fear; it affords you a level of closeness that you probably wouldn’t otherwise have based on the length of time you’ve known each other. Accordingly, Steve invites me up to see where he builds. This is only the second time I’ve seen another man’s LEGO room, and it’s intensely personal. These aren’t just sets and bricks, they’re memories and dreams. As Steve guides me through a moon base he’s working on, which includes an intricate rock floor made of gray cheese wedges, he switches from employee to hobbyist. It’s a subtle change, but it’s nice to see. He’s more relaxed, and the time passes quickly.

 

 

It’s late when I get back to my parents’ house on Tuesday night for dinner.

“Do you want to build?” I ask my dad nervously as we’re clearing the plates.

“Sure, why not,” he says.

I run up the stairs to my bedroom and grab the Brickstructures Sears Tower set I purchased at Brickworld. It’s sixty-nine pieces; we can do this before he changes his mind.

My dad cuts the bag with a pair of scissors and lays out the pieces.

“That’s not a stud,” says my dad.

“Nope. There’s a lot of new pieces since the last time we built together,” I tell him; and as we sort parts, I teach him the name for each one. I draw confidence from the fact that I’m teaching him something. It must be rewarding to be a dad.

A pair of 1 × 1 plates are stuck together, and both of us try to pry them apart unsuccessfully.

“We both used nail clippers today,” says my dad, noticing my short nails. I wish for a brick separator, and cringe when my father reaches for the pair of scissors to pry the plates apart.

“Don’t use them—you’ll ruin the integrity of the bricks,” I scold him lightly. I briefly recall my conversation with the master model builders at lunch. I don’t tell him that we have offended my gods by spray-painting our first attempt at the Sears Tower.

We fall into the comfortable rhythm of building, and my dad offers his first critique of the set.

“This is redundant, we’re just stacking pieces on top of each other.”

He’s right, but I don’t care. I’m building again with my dad.

“Ow!” He pinches his finger trying to snap the final brick into place. “It’s good,” he says, pronouncing it done.

We’ve finished too quickly, I want to tell him. The set has taken only thirteen minutes to build. My dad surprises me by taking the old shoe box with the first Sears Tower we built out of a cabinet.

“Let’s see how we did,” says my dad. He spins the model around 360 degrees. The first side is the only one that is close to right, with a tiered face. The back half of the building is completely transposed—almost the mirror image of the stacked-tubes tower design.

“So this was fourth grade?” asks my dad.

“The state fair. I think we would have won, if they had been giving out prizes,” I reply.

I don’t really want this moment to end, so I blurt out the first thing I can think of. “Do you want to build another set?”

“Sure, go pick one out,” says my dad.

It’s like Roy Hobbs telling the batboy Bobby Savoy to go pick him a winner in the final game of his career. I settle on the smallest set I’ve bought, a tiny Creator crane. The age range is seven to twelve years old. I think my dad can build it without getting frustrated. Neither of us is a patient man, but this is the first time I’ve wondered if my dad would have fun playing with something.

He starts putting together the crane while I fiddle with a small LEGO penguin model, a gift from the project manager of the model shop. Our silence is one of contentment.

“It spins, oh lordy,” says my dad, noticing that the yellow cab on top of the crane rotates.

“When was the last time you said ‘oh, lordy’?”

“I don’t know, but I just did,” says my dad. He starts laughing, and I join in. Fairly soon, I’m giggling like I used to do on the hourlong drive back from New York City to Fairfield, when my brother would make me laugh so hard that I cried—until my dad threatened both of us with pulling over the car.

That night I can’t sleep, so I do what I always do when I’m staying at my parents’ house. I watch terrible movies on cable, keeping the sound low so my parents think I’m asleep. I hit bottom around two-thirty in the morning with Jamie Kennedy in
Kickin’ It Old Skool,
where he plays a break-dancer who awakens from a coma and attempts to reunite with his old dancing crew of the 1980s.

In one of the climactic scenes of the movie (one hour and twenty-two minutes in—please don’t judge me too harshly), we find Jamie Kennedy’s character, Justin, struggling with having never grown up.

Bartender: “Why are you smashing LEGOs?”

Justin: “These are a lie. They teach you that life is all fun and you can make anything you want, but you can’t really make anything you want. You just get old, boring, and fat.”

It’s late enough that I find myself disagreeing strongly with a terrible Hollywood comedy. I can make anything I want. I can build again with my dad. I will build with my child when I’m a dad. These are my thoughts as I fall asleep to the static-y crackle of the television set.

My Christmas wish is granted. I challenge Darth Vader to a light-saber duel at LEGOLAND California in Carlsbad, California. We fight to a draw.

It’s just past midnight when my flight lands in Kansas City the next night. The traffic-congested Brooklyn-Queens Expressway on the way to LaGuardia Airport in New York City has been exchanged for a half-dozen cars marked by silent headlights on the roads home. I walk lightly when I enter the house, hoping not to wake the dog. She is our sleeping baby. Charlie whines softly from her crate in my office, and I stop, the carpeted stairs creaking in reply. She stays quiet, and I debate whether I should go in and check on her. I hear Kate turn over in our bed and head upstairs instead.

“I built with my dad,” I tell her excitedly before launching into what it was like at LEGO U.S. headquarters. I am a seven-year-old who has just returned from his first sleepover. Kate listens sleepily, adding in “Uh-huh,” at the right moments before drifting off to sleep. She stops just short of “That’s nice, dear,” the hallmark of any mom dealing with an overexcited husband or child. I shut my eyes too, content to be home. And I make the grown-up decision to sleep in my polo shirt and jeans.

 

 

I awake in bed to the gentle pressure of Kate’s hand on my back. It’s only been two days since I came home, so it takes me a second to remember that I’m in Kansas City and she’s not in Fairfield.

“I’m pregnant,” says Kate, holding up the test that echoes what she’s saying in blocky capital letters.

“That’s wonderful,” I say thickly, turning over to pull her into my arms.

“I’m still in shock.... I didn’t expect it. I’ve had so many negative ones and that’s why when I took this one, I just thought there was no way,” says Kate before sitting up to wipe her hands across her cheeks.

We finally have a use for that third bedroom.

“We can still keep LEGO in there, right?” I ask.

“What part of ‘choking hazard’ do you not understand?”

“They’re not a choking hazard, they have the holes in the tops of minifigs,” I offer weakly.

Kate gives me a single look that I can see will be effective when she is a mother. It says,
You’re not being serious right now, because if you are, I will need to correct you in short order.

“Right, I’ll move the LEGO.” I’m glad one of us has a basic understanding of babies. I will need a new LEGO room.

My office is the most likely candidate, although it currently looks like the back room of a Woolworth’s department store that is in the process of closing. Sets and cardboard boxes are stacked behind the dog crate on the floor. Open sets are leaking parts—the concept of organization seems to have escaped a forgetful stockroom clerk.

I pick up a smaller set, Batman’s Buggy, which features Batman and Mr. Freeze minifigures. I reason that the quickest way toward getting everything organized is to start building.

“It’s about to get cold in here,” I say in a vaguely Austrian accent as I tear open the bags. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger would be mortified by my accent, but I think impressed by his minifig likeness.

The two miniature vehicles in the seventy-eight-piece set are done in just over four minutes. Joe Meno says I shouldn’t worry about speed, but I’m still proud of the fact that I build faster with each set. It helps that I’m no longer surprised by parts or elements. Like a good chess player, I can see a few steps ahead during the build. While I’m not sure that Batman would utilize a buggy to fight crime, the set includes a cool flame element and rear fin that add a bit of style to the caped crusader’s vehicle. Even in the short time I spend constructing the kit, I’m already considering how I might use the silver pistons in the buggy to build a muscle car, and how Mr. Freeze’s helmet could be the cockpit for a mini retro rocket ship.

The Batman set inspires a mini LEGO building boom. Well, that and my need to channel all of the adrenaline I have in the week after learning that Kate is pregnant. I tackle five sets over the next five days, two of which are larger than the LEGO MTT Federation I’ve been avoiding since my thirtieth birthday. Suddenly that set doesn’t seem so scary, but I still leave it untouched in what is rapidly coming to be known as the baby’s room.

While I’m focusing on the sets in my office, Kate has become vexed by her search for a bedside lamp to put in the guest bedroom. I think we’re expressing our need to nest in very different ways. However, this presents me with an opportunity to bring a bit of Denmark into the textured walls of our Tudor-style house.

It’s easy to fall in love with Danish design. The neat, clean lines suggest that you will become not only more organized, but infinitely cooler. Yet, despite a few days in Copenhagen spent in the polished halls of modern design galleries and cosmopolitan museums, I just want a light that reminds me of the bell-shaped acrylic lamps that hung from the ceiling over the staircase leading to the entrance of LEGOLAND Billund.

At the height of Kate’s frustration, I manage to convince her that we can emulate the clear lamps filled with monochromatic LEGO bricks. A local store sells empty, oversize jelly jars that have been wired as table lamps.

“We’re going to fill the lamp with LEGO bricks,” I tell the woman at the register (I’ll admit with entirely too much enthusiasm).

“That will be ...,” she pauses, “... nice.” Her left eye squinches like a pirate as she ends the word “nice” with a long “s” to show her true meaning. She is not ni-ssss.

Kate is uncertain about the idea until the base is filled with white bricks and elements.

“It doesn’t look half-bad,” says Kate. She is being nice to me, but I’ll take it.

The LEGO lamp satisfies the part of her that needs to cross it off the list before guests arrive for the holidays, while I’m pleased that we’ve managed to add LEGO to one of the few rooms in the house that didn’t have any bricks.

By now there is no doubt that LEGO fans live in the Bender house. Since it’s December, I can finally start to open the Castle Advent calendar I bought for Kate at Brickworld. It’s agony waiting for her to come home from work each day so we can open the next window. A LEGO blog counts down to Christmas by unveiling the completed minifig or castle feature of the day, like a witch’s cauldron. I find myself getting angry when I accidentally see one before we’ve had a chance to open the window; it is as soul-crushing as a television show spoiler.

Kate creates a holiday display on top of the entertainment center, having long ago surrendered the fireplace mantel to LEGO creations. She slowly separates the medieval minifigs into good guys and bad guys. I’m a bit disturbed that I think I bear a decent resemblance to a mine-working dwarf. If Kate notices, she keeps it to herself. I shave in the hope that she never reaches the same conclusion.